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New prospects for imaging the developing brain: opportunities and challenges

The brain undergoes rapid development during the fetal and neonatal
period with lifelong consequences, presenting a critical window for
investigations using structural and functional imaging. A number of
high-profile projects are currently underway to acquire high quality data in
the perinatal age range and make them available to the community. These include
the developing Human Connectome Project and the Washington Fetal Brain MRI
Database, amongst others.

These resources are expected to lead to high impact discoveries. However, data
acquisition and analysis is challenging in the developing brain, and users
should be aware of the constraints as well as the possible benefits and
opportunities inherent in the data. Many, if not all, imaging characteristics
change dramatically during development, including brain size, image contrast
and artefacts, physiological signals and behavioural features such as head
motion. This symposium will review the technical challenges that arise from
imaging these complex changes, identify leading strategies, and describe
approaches to address key unresolved challenges.

This programme will cover a range of aspects, including the biological
differences in the developing brain compared to the adult brain, their impact
on the acquired data, the practical issues of scanning small subjects prone to
motion, and the adaptations needed in both the imaging protocol and the
associated post-processing and analysis techniques to handle these issues.
State of the art methods will be presented, and outstanding problems and
questions that remain to be satisfactorily answered will be discussed.